God With Us

Matthew 1:18-25

Introduction

Everyone is excited when a baby is born. Grandparents are proud, parents are nervous and excited and everyone cheers at the beginning of new life. When our daughter was born we lived in The Pas and after she was born, I was walking down the hallway of the hospital and some people from our church saw me and said that just by the look on my face they could tell that it was good news.

One of the challenges which parents face at the birth of a child is the naming of that child. While mom is pregnant baby books are purchased and names are evaluated. The choosing of a name often takes a lot of time and negotiation. Parents have different reasons for choosing a name. Sometimes the baby is named because of family tradition. For example, those of you who follow NFL have heard about RG3 or Robert Griffin III. When he was named the choice was made to name him after his father and grandfather. For some people the way a name sounds is very important. We talked with someone this week about baby names and when we mentioned a baby’s first and second name they said, “That sounds good together.” Sometimes names are chosen because of the meaning of the name. When our children were born, it was important to me that their name have some faith based meaning, so Joel means “Jehovah is God,” Kristen means “Christ follower” and Jonathan means “gift of God.”

These days we are talking about the birth of someone who is very important to us. His birth was very exciting and full of significance. The names given to this child are also full of meaning. As we examine Matthew 1:18-25 we want to think about what these things mean for the world and for us. Let’s begin by reading this passage.

I.                A Baby is Born

A.               A Problem

Last weekend, my sister and her family were here for the engagement party of their adopted children whom they unofficially adopted a few years ago. There are three of them, a couple and the man’s 24 year old brother and they immigrated from Congo. The young man found a girl he wanted to marry who lives in Winnipeg and so they came from Edmonton to negotiate the dowry and then to celebrate the engagement. In summer they will be married in Edmonton. As they described, particularly the paying of the dowry to the bride’s family, I realized that the practices surrounding engagement and marriage are somewhat different than what we are used to.

The same would be true of the customs common in the Middle East at the time when the Bible was written. At that time, an engagement would be negotiated between the groom’s family and the bride’s family. After the engagement, there would be a period called the betrothal. During this time the couple would be considered so significantly promised to each other that a death of one of them would leave the other widowed. Yet they did not live together during this time. Then after about a year of betrothal, they would be married and come together as husband and wife.

During the time of betrothal of Joseph and Mary, Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant. This was not good news. Anyone who would find out that she was pregnant would suspect that Joseph had made her pregnant. This would not have been morally acceptable in the community. Joseph, however, knew that he had not caused her to be pregnant. Therefore, the only explanation he had was that she had been unfaithful, which was the same as adultery because of the deep bond of the betrothal.

The text tells us that Joseph was a righteous man. What does a righteous man do when he finds out that his betrothed has been unfaithful to him? What does a righteous man do when the community suspects that he has had sex before the appropriate time? As a righteous man he had to distance himself from Mary so that everyone would know that he had not done it. It also would be just for him to allow the penalty for adultery to be carried out on Mary.

However, the text also tells us that he was “unwilling to expose her to public disgrace.” That would have been the righteous thing to do, but he also understood that it was harsh and so we see something else about Joseph and that is that he was gracious and compassionate. He obviously loved Mary and was kind enough not to want the full power of the law applied.

So Joseph was wrestling with this difficult situation. How could he do what was righteous and at the same time compassionate? The only solution he could think of was “to dismiss her quietly.” In that way he would maintain righteousness but also not expose her to the harsh penalties of the law.

B.               An Explanation

While he was thinking about these things an angel of the Lord came to him in a dream to explain the situation to him. The angel encouraged Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife. He explained that it was not some other man who had caused Mary to be pregnant, but that it was God Himself, through His Spirit who had caused Mary to conceive.

It says a lot about Joseph that he accepted this angelic message. He was a man who must have trusted God even though I suspect that he did not understand what all this meant. Yet we see that he did follow through on the explanation of the angel. He obeyed in several ways. He took her to be his wife. That means that if people found out the time between marriage and the child’s birth was too short, they would have assumed that Joseph had done it. In taking her as his wife, he was saying that he was willing to bear this potential accusation. He honored her further by taking her as his wife, thus likely shortening the period of betrothal and yet he did not have sex with her until after Jesus was born. It seems to me that to do this it took a man with compassion, self-discipline and one who honored both God and his wife. He also obeyed by naming the baby Jesus, just as the angel had told him to.

This is the story of the birth of Jesus as Matthew tells it. It presents significant information about the importance of His birth, but it is in the naming of the child that that meaning is explained.

II.             A Baby is Named

In this account of the birth of the child, two names are given to him. These two names are loaded with meaning about what Jesus came to be and do and it is worth our while to think about these names and their meaning.

A.               Jesus

The name Jesus was not an uncommon name among the Jews. It was the Greek form of the name Joshua which was quite common. The “Je” portion of the name refers to Jehovah and the “sus” portion of the name comes from the verb “to save.” So the name means God is salvation or God saves. The angel told Joseph to name the child Jesus and that the reason for this name was in accordance with the meaning of the name, “for he will save his people from their sins.”

The desire of the Jewish people of that time was for salvation, but it wasn’t necessarily salvation from their sins that they sought. They had a pretty good system in place to deal with their sins. The nation would meet together on Yom Kippur every year to offer a sacrifice for the sins of the nation and God had promised that if they did this they would be forgiven. In addition, any time anyone sinned, they could make a sacrifice in the temple and the promise of God was that their sins would be forgiven. Forgiveness of sins was not uppermost in the minds of most of them. What was uppermost in their minds was salvation from the oppression of foreign domination. The Romans had conquered the land and they were not nice. They mocked, they oppressed, they taxed and they contradicted their beliefs. The salvation the Jews were waiting for, after 500 or 600 years of oppression by various nations, was for salvation from oppression. They waited for Messiah to come and save His people from foreign rulers.

Is salvation from sins in our mind as we think about the name of Jesus who came “to save his people from their sins?” We also would like salvation from all kinds of things. We would like salvation from poverty, lack, oppression, injustice and broken relationships. But the message of the angel is that “…he will save his people from their sins.” Why do we need salvation from sins more than any other kind of salvation?

If we compare ourselves with one another we could easily get the idea that we don’t need salvation from sins. Everyone is like everyone else. Oh sure, there are a few people who are a lot worse and they need salvation from sins, but we ourselves are not really that bad. But is that an accurate understanding of things? When we compare ourselves with God or when we stop excusing all the little missed steps we take, we know that we do need salvation from sins.

We know that sins are in all of us. After a wonderful worship service in which we sense the holiness of God and rejoice in His goodness, we may well be motivated to commit ourselves to holy living and to pleasing the one whose love we have experienced. Yet most likely by the time we have gotten home we have sinned in some thought, word or deed.

We know that sins have power over us. We may be perfectly able to have victory over one area and we rejoice at the strength we have never to slander another or to lust. But what about the other areas? What about the gossip or the hatred which in spite of our best efforts still draw us into disobedience far too often?

And when our careless word or hateful deed is released, we watch as hearts are crushed or souls discouraged and we once again are made fully aware of the awful destructive power of sin.

Ultimately the destructive power of sin leads to death. Death is the punishment of God for sin, but it is also the final target of the trajectory of the destructive results of sin. When we contemplate sin like that, we know that we need salvation from sins – our own, our communities and our world’s sins.

            So the good news contained in the name of this child is good news indeed! Salvation from sin assumes that we share in the problem of a world in bondage to evil and redeems us from our contribution to it.

            The story of Jesus is the story of how that happened. Jesus came into this world to live as a human being. He lived all his life and never once did he give in to any of those destructive urges. He lived without sin. The relationship between sin and death is that of an equation. If you sin, you die. If you die, you must have sinned. If you don’t sin, you don’t die. If you don’t die, you must not have sinned. However, that equation breaks down when it comes to Jesus. He did not sin, but he died, How can that be? The only possible explanation is that He did not die for his own sins, but for the sins of every person on earth. He took the punishment for every one of us. The guilt of every sin we commit has been placed on Jesus. That is how Jesus saved us from our sins. He took the guilt of our sins and the punishment for our sins on Himself. Because He was raised from the dead, we know that God accepted His sacrifice and because of His resurrection, He also made it possible for us to live in a new way by the power of His Spirit instead of under the power of sin. That is how this child fulfilled the meaning of His name, Jesus.

B.               Emmanuel

The other name which we find is that given by the angel to Joseph, the name Emmanuel. The angel explained to Joseph that the name came in prophetic fulfillment. The prophecy was made in Isaiah 7:14 and originally referred to someone who was to be born in that day, but had already long been recognized as referring to the coming Messiah. Emmanuel, or Immanuel, either way is OK means “God with us.” The “imman” part means “with.” The “u” means us and the “el” part of the word means God, so “with us God.”

Although everyone understands that God is present everywhere, Emmanuel means something more than the omnipresence of God. The power of God’s presence with us is explained in the way in which Jesus came to be on earth. This is the mystery of what happened to Mary and what Joseph had to understand. Mary was a human girl. She was not immaculate, as some suggest, but was a normal human woman with normal human temptations and normal human failures. Being born of Mary, Jesus was completely a human being. That is the part of the story emphasized in the name “Emmanuel” which speaks of presence in the human family and in the world of human beings. What is really exciting about this name, however, is that it is God who is with us. The story tells us that Mary conceived without the help of any man. We don’t know exactly how this happened, whether the Holy Spirit caused the egg to be fertilized or whether the Holy Spirit placed a fertilized egg into the womb of Mary. With artificial insemination and test tube conception we don’t find this as difficult to understand as people might have at one time. These are also not the important things, but what is important is to understand that however it happened, through Mary and through the work of the Holy Spirit, God became a human being. God came among us in a way that He had never been among us before. The mystery of the birth of Jesus to Mary by the agency of the Holy Spirit gives us the wonder of incarnation, of God becoming flesh, of God coming among us.

What is the meaning of God with us? Philip Yancey has a wonderful chapter on this theme in his book, “The Jesus I Never Knew.” I have borrowed from his writing to help us think about the meaning of this name.

            Emmanuel means that we have a humble God. When foreign dignitaries come to visit our country, the cost can be huge. In 2010 Canada hosted the G8 and the G20 summit in Toronto. Before it even began, the cost for hosting this event was projected to be around $1.1 billion. About $160 million of that was for hospitality and much of the rest was for security. When God came to earth, he was born as a baby to a poor family in a feeding trough for animals. Yancey says, “The God who came to earth came not in a raging whirlwind nor in a devouring fire. Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum…” Philippians 2:6-8, describes that humbling when it says, "…who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross." What are the implications of that humbling?

            God with us means that God is approachable. Yancey points out that “In most religious traditions, in fact, fear is the primary emotion when one approaches God.” Even in the Old Testament people approached God with fear. When Moses stood at the burning bush, he was told to remove his sandals because of the almighty presence of God. When Israel stood at the foot of the mountain, they were told not to touch the mountain because God was on the mountain and they could be struck down. When Uzzah reached out to touch the Ark he was killed immediately for his impiety. Yet a God who becomes human has changed the paradigm. No more is God distant, aloof, unapproachable and fearful. He has come to us and therefore, we can go to Him. Yancey says, “The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become a spot on a painting or a playwright a character within his own play.” Therefore, “In Jesus, God found a way of relating to human beings that did not involve fear.”

            God with us means that God came into this world in order to defeat power and overcome authority but to do so through weakness. When Mary celebrated her pregnancy in the presence of Elizabeth we read in Luke 1 that she rejoiced that she was about to have a baby. But she also understood something of the unusual way in which God was going to work through Him. She understood that through the “lowliness of his servant,” “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Through becoming Emmanuel, God came into the world to accomplish victory through weakness and this theme continues throughout the life of Jesus as he accomplished victory over sin, death and all powers by accepting death as his method of operating.

            Yancey tells the story of the fish he keeps in his aquarium. He cleans the water, cares for them and feeds them every day. Yet every time he comes near to them they respond with fear and swim quickly to the farthest corners of the aquarium. The only way to remove the fear and let them know that he is caring for them is to become a fish himself. That is what God has done.     

Conclusion

            Those of you on Facebook may have seen the post we put on this week. It explained the meaning of Christmas in this way, “God visited us. Later on we’ll be heading back to His place.” That is Christmas in a nutshell isn’t it? Emmanuel was the name of the child that told us that God visited us. Jesus was the name of the child that tells us our sins can be forgiven and because they are, we are able to go to God’s place.

            What a blessing! The wonder of this is that the birth of this child is not meant only to be celebrated, but to be received. I saw a rendition of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen this week. I liked the music, but the way in which it was done, it seemed as if those performing had no clue about the power of the words they sang. The song declares, “Remember, Christ, our Saviour was born on Christmas Day to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.” Such truth can not only be celebrated, but must be accepted, followed and lived. May Jesus, Emmanuel become more than just the reason for the season, but the reason why we wake up each day, the foundation of our daily plans, the confidence of our hope and the basis for our joy.

Here is Your God

 

Isaiah 35:1-10

Introduction

Last Sunday we had a true advent message in which Edgar reminded us that advent is a time of waiting. He pointed to Habakkuk 2:3, "For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay." That verse says, “For there is still a vision for the appointed time.” What is that vision? This morning we will look at Isaiah 35:1-10 which speaks about the vision and encourages us that what we are waiting for is worth waiting for.

            Have you ever been in a wilderness? Of course wilderness can mean many things. It can be a place so remote that hardly anyone goes there. It can be a place so harsh that nothing can live there. The imagery of wilderness speaks about emptiness, loss and lack. There are many kinds of wilderness places in our world.

            The Sahara desert is getting larger. It is expanding south into a region called the Sahel. The term for this is desertification, which does not mean that your dessert is gone, but that the desert is increasing. One website defines it as “a type of land degradation in which a relatively dry land region becomes increasingly arid, typically losing its bodies of water as well as vegetation and wildlife.”

The problem with desertification is that when desert areas increase, so do areas of poverty for the populations that live there. In 2007 Reuters reported that “About 1.2 billion people are at risk from desertification as deserts expand and degraded dry lands cover close to a third of the world's land surface area, the United Nations estimates.” This is a type of wilderness both in the devastation of the land and the devastation to human populations.

            But you don’t have to live in a desert to lack life’s basic necessities. 1 Timothy 6:8 says, "…but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these." But many people in the world don’t even have enough food or clothing. Among the poorest countries in the world are Chad, Haiti, Congo and Liberia where more than 75% of the people live on less than $2 a day. The degree of poverty in Canada may not be the same as that, but it’s devastating effects are.

            Yet abject poverty is not the only type of loss and lack. The Canadian Mental Health Association says that 20% of Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime. At any given time 5-10% of Canadians are dealing with some form of depression or mental illness. And even that is not the only experience of loss. All of us will experience the debilitating effects of aging. We will experience loss of hearing, eyesight, motor function and possibly mental function.

            One of the greatest areas of wilderness in our world is the wilderness of living without God. At some time in our life most of us have questions about where God is. Some people go through their whole life not even aware that God loves them and they die without God and without hope.

It is in the context of such a broad understanding of wilderness that we are in a season of waiting.

I.                God has Promised Renewal

It is in that context that we read Isaiah 35 where God speaks directly to the problem of wilderness and promises the complete reversal of wilderness.

A.               Reclamation of Wilderness

The reversal spoken of here is reversal of desert areas and I think we should allow this to stand as a promise that physical desert areas will become verdant once again. There are three words for this area, including wilderness, dry land and desert. But the promise is that these arid areas will bloom once again. Flowers bloom in deserts only when there is water, which is a picture of hope in a dry land. When it rains, everything changes and that is the promise that comes to this wilderness area.

The text goes on to speak of the change that occurs when the lush forests of Lebanon take over the desert and when the beauty of Carmel and Sharon are given to that which was formerly desert. These are images which speak of the reversal of wilderness and dryness and the formation of beautiful places instead.

            Such images of physical renewal continue in verses 6 and 7. Streams in the desert are images of water in a place where there is usually not water. In addition we read that the “burning sand shall become a pool.” Jackals are mostly dry land animals but when this renewal comes, their desert landscape will become a place where there is lots of water. It also says that grasses which can survive on dry land will be replaced by the reeds and rushes which exist only in places where there is plenty of water. All of these images speak loudly proclaiming that there will be a complete change from wilderness and desert to lush growing landscape. Young says, “The waste world will become like an earthly paradise, for a whole reversal of conditions will set in.”

            Our physical world is broken. As a result of the brokenness of our physical world it is suffering. Romans 8:19 says, "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now…” This tells us that the physical world is broken because of our sin and we continue to cause the brokenness of the physical world by our abuse of it through pollution and exploitation. The promise of Isaiah 35 is that this condition of increasing wilderness will be completely reversed. God will come and make all things new. That is good news for all those who suffer from typhoons, blizzards, wild fires and desertification.

B.               Return of God

But the reversal of wilderness is not only of the physical desert areas. It is also announced as a reversal of the absence of God. God, of course, is not absent. But we do not see Him. Our sins have separated us from Him. Romans 1 talks about our refusal to acknowledge the evidence of His presence that is all around us. We cannot see Him because we are too full of rebellion and sin to see Him in His holiness.

Yet the promise of this passage is that all of this will be reversed. Verse 2 promises, “They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.”

So often we ask ourselves what the Psalmist declared in Psalm 42:2, 3, "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’” The promise of God’s presence is good news for those who ask this question.

C.               Recovery of Health

We also read about a complete reversal of all our health issues. The most common prayer request in almost every church is the request for healing. In verses 5, 6 we read that the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will leap and the speechless will sing. These are just representative of the good news that all health problems will be reversed.

This is good news for anyone who is suffering with any kind of health related pain or loss.

D.              Return to God

We have gone on canoe trips in which the first part of the journey is a divided highway, the next part a two lane highway, the third part a gravel road and the last part little more than a bush trail. The deeper one goes into wilderness, the more difficult the road becomes. Grogan says, “In ancient times men did not build roads across stretches of desert. Such an enterprise would have seemed economically stupid as well as involving a criminal waste of life.”

The last three verses in the text promise that in an area that was formerly a wilderness area there will be a road.

The implication is not only that the area will have become fertile, but that the road has a very important destination. It is a road that goes to the presence of God. It goes to Zion, which is imagery that comes from the Old Testament. Remember the hymn “We’re marching to Zion?” The imagery of marching to Zion comes from such texts as Psalm 50:2, "Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth." Zion is the place where God is. A road that leads to Zion is a road that goes to where God is. The description of the road is also appealing. It is road for those who are righteous and not for those who are unfit to meet God. It is a safe road because there won’t be “any ravenous beast” there. Written at a time when Israel was being sent away from Zion because of her sin, this is a promise of renewal, of return to God, of restoration of God’s reign, of the return of people who belong to God.

That is good news for all who are lost and for all who seek God.

 

E.               Restoration of Joy

One of the most powerful images in this scene of renewal is the presence of joy. Disappointment often tempers our joy. We would like to be really happy, but experience has taught us that disappointment will come soon enough and spoil our joy. So we don’t allow our joy to become too great because we don’t want to experience the disappointment that will surely follow.

There is no such tempering of joy in this passage. Joy permeates the whole passage and singing is abundant. The words glad, rejoice, joy, singing, everlasting joy and gladness appear without reserve in verses 1, 2, 6 & 10.

Jeremiah 20:18 expresses what is often the reality of our life when it says, "Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?" In place of such sadness, this passage promises great and unhindered joy. It is good news to those who are filled with depression and sorrow.

What a wonderful expression of reversal. It gives us everything we have hoped for. Did you hear about the Westjet Christmas miracle? The unbelievable delight in the eyes of some of the people who received gifts unexpectedly was wonderful. What would we ask for if we knew we could ask for anything? How wonderful would it be to receive what we really need! That is what this passage promises. A reversal of all we need most. The fulfillment of that which we have given up hoping for. Reclamation of wilderness. Return of God. Recovery of health. Return to God and restoration of complete joy. 

II.             How is this Promise Fulfilled?

These are powerful promises, but how are they fulfilled and when?

A.               Where God Is

One of the messages which we see in this text is that these promises are fulfilled where God is. Verse 4 comes right to the point when it says, “Here is your God.” Young writes, “When God comes and saves his people then they will experience a great change.”

Who is God? God is creator, life giver, redeemer, Saviour, healer. God is love and has all power to accomplish His purposes. God is holy and just and does what is right. When we recognize and acknowledge who God is, we have the assurance that where God is, such reversal is possible. He has accomplished amazing reversals in history past. He delivered Noah through the flood. He saved an entire slave nation from Egypt. He delivered His people through the Red Sea. He made the sun stand still. God has done powerful deeds of reversal and so we are confident that the promises of renewal spoken of in this passage will happen where God is.

            Yet we wonder how will it come? God is able, but how will the renewal happen in history?

B.               When Jesus Came

Some of these promises of renewal are seen to be fulfilled when Jesus came the first time. The woman at the well experienced hope so unusual that she left her water jar behind and went to town and invited the towns people to meet Messiah. She experienced a renewal that caused her to forget about the necessity of life, water, and find real life. The woman at Simon’s house was so filled with joy because her sins were forgiven that she spent a fortune saying thank-you to Jesus. These are illustrations of the joy that came to those who experienced reversal of loss through Jesus.

Verses 5, 6 speak about renewal for those who are blind, deaf, lame and cannot speak. Jesus brought a reversal of these conditions as we read in Mark 8:25 of the man whose sight was restored; in Mark 7:35 of the man whose ears were opened; in Acts 3:8 of the lame man who was “leaping and praising God” and in Luke 1:64 of the one whose tongue was freed and who began to speak, praising God.

When we studied Mark a while ago, we saw not only that those who were physically deaf or blind were able to see and hear again. We also saw how the disciples, who were spiritually deaf and blind, began to have their ears and eyes opened.

Jesus was God present with us and so it is not surprising that when God came near in the person of Jesus these things began to happen. The renewal promised began to be fulfilled in the coming of Jesus.

C.               When Jesus Comes

And yet we still have wilderness in our world today. Jesus came to fulfill this promise of renewal, but the time for complete renewal has not yet come. Has the promise failed? Not at all. Its fulfillment comes in two stages. It is not an unusual thing in Scripture that a prophecy made in the Old Testament seems to be one promise, but its fulfillment happens in two events. The renewal which is promised happened not only when Jesus came the first time, but will be completely fulfilled when He comes the second time. God sees one promise, but fulfills the promise in two stages. This should encourage us because we have already seen the initial fulfillment. We have seen that God has brought renewal and so we can be encouraged that He will also bring the complete renewal spoken of in this passage.

The one thing that puzzles us in this passage is verse 4. There we are encouraged that the promised renewal comes when God comes, as we read, “Here is your God.” But then we read in verse 4, “He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.” Some would like to remove the mention of vengeance because it seems to be so out of character for God. Yet how will the renewal come without the removal of all that works against it? How will peace come without the removal of those who would make war? How will the renewal of safety come without the removal of those who would do violence? How can we remove locks from our houses and security systems from our church without the removal of those who would break in and steal?

Exodus 34:6 proclaims a similar message. There we read about the love of God, but also about the justice of God when we read, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty…”

            Evil must be put out of the way. It is what spoils our world. The vengeance of God assures us that He will put evil out of the way to make room for the renewal which He will also bring.

Conclusion

Wilderness abounds in our world. The farmer in sub-Saharan Africa watching the mountain of sand encroach year by year on his small patch of farmland knows about wilderness. The drug addict who in spite of valiant efforts can’t seem to shake the habit knows about wilderness. The person suffering with chronic pain that sometimes is so painful that they cannot sleep, eat or do anything else but think of pain knows what wilderness means. The person who is all alone, having been abandoned by spouse and children for no apparent reason knows what wilderness is. The person who is overwhelmed by sin and crying out wondering where God is also understand wilderness. What is the wilderness in your life?

The message of this passage is a word of hope, to encourage the heart which experiences emptiness, loss and lack. It is a message to strengthen those for whom hope has almost been abandoned. We read this word in verses 3, 4, "Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.’ He will come … and save you.”

Last week Edgar told us that advent is a time of waiting. Even though we don’t want to wait and we move quickly to the celebration of Christmas without waiting, the truth is that even Christmas manifests evidence of wilderness. In it we celebrate the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promise. But lack, loneliness and loss are also magnified at Christmas, so even though it is good to celebrate, we know that we are still in a time of waiting. For all those who wait for the removal of pain, recovery from illness, relief from loneliness, peace in relationships, replacement of what has been lost, this passage once again calls us to wait, but it does something more. It also assures us that it is worth waiting. The first coming of Jesus assures us that God is present and has already shown us what He will do in bringing about renewal. That gives us confidence about what God can do and what God will do. There is reason to wait and what we wait for is worth waiting for. The renewal that is coming will be so great that the images presented to us in Isaiah 35 will be fulfilled in ways that we cannot now imagine. We do not need to fear what is or what will be before the end because we know what will be at the end.

So as we celebrate advent and Christmas, let us do so with great joy because we know the hope to which we have been called and we have seen a glimpse of what will be.

Because of the hope of renewal, we can also work with enthusiasm. Shaking hands can’t do and shaking knees can’t stand. Fear prevents us from many activities. But when we know what will be, what God has in mind for us and our world. When we know that a complete renewal is being planned, we can work to proclaim the message of hope. We can working in accord with renewal. In God’s strength we can do His work as renewed people of God.

            May the message of renewal give courage, joy and peace to our hearts as we celebrate the first coming of Jesus and wait for His second coming.